The present invention relates generally to cartoners, and specifically to cartoners for use in cartoning bundles of elongated articles wherein the bundles have a predetermined shape.
Such cartoning machines heretofore have required the use of accurately machined and shaped buckets into which the elongated articles were placed for shaping into the desired bundle before insertion into a carton on an adjacent carton conveyor. The accurately machined and shaped buckets were very expensive to manufacture. This was particularly disadvantageous because in certain installations, the article conveyor had to be quite long, thus requiring a correspondingly large number of the accurately machined and shaped buckets.
The long article conveyors were necessitated by the fact that occasionally each article bucket had to go past more than one product weighing unit, this requiring a substantial reach of the article conveyor, with the corresponding increase in the number of expensive article buckets.
In yet other installations, it was desired to increase the production rate. A typical such installation was that for cartoning spaghetti, wherein a predetermined charge of spaghetti was placed into a bundle, the charge of spaghetti being regulated by weight from a weighing machine, such as the well known Hesser machine. If article conveyor speeds of as much as 180 cartons per minute were to be realized, two such weighing machines were provided placing the charges respectivey into alternate buckets on the article conveyor. If a speed of 250 cartons per minute was required, then three weighing machines were needed, and if a speed of 300 cartons per minute was required, then four weighing machines were required, the weighing machines depositing the weighed bundle of spaghetti into every third or every fourth article bucket, as the case may be. The speed of operation of the weighing machines also is determined by the weight of the product per carton, smaller weights permitting higher speeds, and larger weights requiring slower speeds. The provision of additional weighing machines require a lengthening of the article conveyor, and thus the utilization of many more of the expensive article buckets.